Those who live and work near smaller airports are at the highest risk of a plane crashing on top of them

When an experimental plane smashed through a fence after a botched takeoff at North Perry Airport in Pembroke Pines a few weeks ago, some nearby homeowners asked themselves a familiar question: Are we safe here?

"I hear the engines stop sometimes in the sky, in mid-flight, and I'm afraid they're going to crash," said Ernesto De Leon, who for 17 years has lived just a few hundred yards from the chain-link fence that encloses North Perry. "I do worry about it."

Every year there are anywhere from two or three to more than a dozen wrecks of planes taking off from or landing at the small, general aviation airports in Broward and south Palm Beach County— North Perry Airport, Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport, Boca Raton Airport and Pompano Beach Air Park.

There's no way to stop all crashes, officials said. Airports already do "as much as possible" to keep those nearby safe, said FAA spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen.

Pilots have to keep their planes and themselves flight-worthy, and if a random inspection or accident investigation shows they didn't they can be fined or their licenses can be revoked or suspended. License renewal requires a medical checkup. Airports are required to maintain runway lights and markings, runway widths and to keep a certain amount of land around the runway empty.

Still, accidents happen.

"I don't know if there's anything you can do about ensuring nothing is going to happen, because you have a house in close proximity to an airport," said Boca Raton Airport spokeswoman Kim Singer. "There's risk inherent in flying, period. Any time you get in an airplane, there is risk."

There are about 1,800 crashes of general aviation aircraft — private planes, student-piloted aircraft, experimental planes, banner-ad planes, news helicopters — for every one commercial plane crash in the U.S., according to National Transportation Safety Board statistics.

That's because pilots of commercial planes undergo more rigorous training, Bergen said, because they will be responsible for so many passengers.

And most crashes happen during or near takeoff and landing, according to the FAA.

That means residents living near general aviation airports are at the highest risk of having a plane smash through their roof.

Barbara Pearce and her daughter Cindy live near North Perry. For them, crashes are a part of life. They can tell a dozen stories off the top of their heads.

"There was one landed on the church, but that was years ago," said Cindy Pearce, who grew up across the street from North Perry and is now raising her son there.

She's seen the smoking wreckage of three crashes in her lifetime, all within walking distance of home. And once, she saw a crash — while playing volleyball as a child, she watched a plane do three cartwheels just inside the airport fence. The pilot and copilot both jumped out of the careening propeller plane.

Nationally, the rate of crashes has been the same for 10 years. In South Florida, some years see just a few crashes, and other years see many more.

The exceptions are Boca Raton and Pompano Beach, where there haven't been more than two crashes a year in a decade and a half. Those airports have fewer takeoffs and landings than the others in South Florida.

North Perry and Executive both do between 150,000 and 175,000 takeoffs and landings a year, about twice as many as Pompano Beach does and four times the number at Boca Raton.

Airport and federal aircraft safety officials said there still aren't that many crashes, though.

Over the last 20 years, there have been more than 4.7 million takeoffs and landings at Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport, and only 33 crashes, said airport spokesman Chaz Adams,

That "equates to approximately one accident for every 142,000 operations," Adams said.

South Florida's crash history has some scary moments, though.

An experimental plane piloted by an 80-year-old man fell from the sky onto Oscar Nolasco's Oakland Park home after taking off from Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport in 2009. It exploded. Neighbors a block away felt the windows rattle.

Luckily, no one was home. Nolasco's 17-year-old nephew had left a few minutes earlier. The house was destroyed. It's an empty lot now. Nolasco moved away.

Nolasco's next-door neighbor, Troy Pierce, still lives in the same house. He said he doesn't worry about getting hit.

"The chances of it happening here again are so low," he said.

The recent incident at Pembroke Pines' North Perry brought to mind a horror story from 1986, when a small jet failed to take off properly and tore through the airport fence to skid across a city baseball diamond — where a little league game had ended just minutes before.

"The nose landed on home plate," Cindy Pearce said. "That made you think, because there would've been kids there not much earlier."